Has your site ever been targeted by malicious link building executed by a competitor?
-
I'm pretty sure one of my client's sites has been targeted by malicious black hat link building tactics employed by a competitor site. Over the last few weeks we've gotten 100s of super low quality spammy backlinks. No one has been doing link building, so the only thing I can think of is that competitor entered our URL into some spammy backlink building sites.
Has anyone else experienced this?
It's the real estate industry, so I wouldn't be surprised considering how competitive it is, but I'd love to hear your experiences.
-
As I understand it Penguin is no longer penalizing sites for bad links but just devalues them/don't count them. So I imagine getting targeted by such methods by a competitor, or even acquiring questionable links from PBNs can't hurt you anymore, but just return 0 value?
-
Hi Justin,
Happy I could be of help. My personal favorite crawling tool is https://www.deepcrawl.com/ I know you can try it for free right now.
Screaming Frog is also an excellent tool I personally prefer the interface and capabilities on deepcrawl.
Monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs is a very comprehensive and good way to detect spam. Majestic is really the only one with the same reach but the most important is Google search console/Google Webmaster tools which is surprisingly very close to Moz OSE.
Ahrefs will definitely do the job.
One tool I should have also included is https://www.distilnetworks.com/ ( unparalleled bot detection) & https://www.stackpath.com/ a new WAF that starts at only $19 and offers MaxCDN's enterprise features like edge rules its price will probably go up but right now it's a steal.
I agree reading the disavow using Ahrefs is never a bad way to go however I've always submitted using Webmaster tools.
All the best,
Tom
-
Thanks!
-
Hi Justin,
I wouldn't be very concerned about a manual action tbh. If these links do fall under manual review, I am confident that the Webspam team will be able to identify these as a spam tactic against your website. I believe the manual action my old client experienced was more of an uncommon occurrence.
Normally, you would respond to the Webspam team via a reconsideration request after they have applied a manual action penalty (will receive message through Google Search Console). In terms of proactive options, you can report these as webspam to the Webspam Team through Google Search Console here. Unfortunately, doing so will not prevent new links such as these from being created.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi Tom -
Thanks so much for your insight - and the tools you've recommended. I also experienced a hacked site in the past where new URLs were created on the client site for nike shoes and what not.
I will disavow for now, but agree - I need to add a crawl with the intention of uncovering those spam URLs in my technical audit process moving forward.
I detected the "attack" simply by monitoring backlinks via Ahrefs. I will disavow using same tool.
Again - your insight is appreciated!
-
Hi Joe -
Thanks for the insight. I agree that disavow is the best course forward, even if Google is devaluing them. A manual penalty is what I'm worried about. How do you directly let the Web Spam team know? I can monitor and continue to disavow, but this could continue to go on indefinitely.
-
I too have seen many clients, unfortunately.
They are targeted by competitors (most likely) sending both fake links for instance in one case a client has a travel site many of the backlinks that were clearly targeted to hurt the site, for instance, the competition / spammers would use the name of an authoritative travel site all they would do is change the TLD so example.com becomes example.co, even though they were tracking their backlinks they were simply looking at the URLs, not the authority of the URL or domain sadly, this is spam, was not detected immediately by the client until they were hit with a manual penalty.
That is when I was brought on and ran a check using Link Research Tools, Ahrefs, Majestic & Moz OSE. Checking for hacks sitecheck.sucuri.net is great & https://sucuri.net/website-security-platform/ to clean and protect.
The worse thing in their case they were not getting a lot of the clear spam that as Joe states above Google does not think anybody is crazy enough to include help their site. mainly Viagra/pornography URLs which I agree with him take Google devalues quickly however you should disavow them. in my experience, Viagra-style spam attacks are the work of a combination of both competitors & black hat SEO spam/hacks in the form of Link injection on hack's, database hack's, content injections and BlackHat SEO that spread the pornography URLs. Like if you look Fiverr at https://www.fiverr.com/gopo2k/provide-you-1-unregistered-domain-for-pbn-with-link-from-nytimes
In cases where the site is seemingly hit over and over again or use a tool like deepcrawl.com or screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider and find out that your database is full of URLs that have been created to spread for promote the spammers site. I always suggest using a web application firewall incapsula.com or sucuri.net ( CloudFare is really not as good until you hit the Pro plan)
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/08/cleaning-hijacked-google-seo-spam-results.html
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2011/04/link-injection-on-hacked-wordpress-sites-blackhat-seo-spam.html
- https://digwp.com/2009/06/spam-link-injection-hacked/
if you're on WordPress you can also save money by having a faster site on a managed wordpress host monitor and you will not have to pay to the fix hacks.
Hope this helps,
Tom
-
Hi Justin!
Yes, I have seen this with multiple clients before. One of my older clients (about 4 years ago now) actually received a manual action as a result. We were working with product reviewers at the time that would include a disclaimer and occasionally leave a link dofollow but we decided to focus on the low quality spam links first. Let the Web Spam team know that these were not our work and that we had no way to contact the webmasters to have them removed. The manual action was lifted a few days later.
I have a client now that also gets links such as these, someone is building thousands of spam links to their site using generic prescription 'pill' anchor text ("buy hydrocodone online", "generic viagra" etc). I have no idea who is doing it. I don't think it is having an impact and frankly shouldn't according to Google's claims with Penguin 4.0 being able to devalue such links. I do still add them to the disavow file to cover all bases though.
Do you feel this is impacting your organic performance?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When conducting a link building strategy does it matter the country the link is from?
We are a UK business and if we have links mostly from US based blogs and websites does this penalise us. The links are from relevant websites and topics. Should we be focusing on .co.uk sites
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing1 -
Relaunching a site that has had thousands of posts linking to the same 20 articles. How to properly setup internal linking?
I'm in the process of relaunching a music news site (www.prefixmag.com) that once did quite well in search (over a million monthly search visits in its prime). The site got crushed by Panda, etc. and we stopped updating it. I'm starting to do more research but one thing that I noticed was we have modules in the right rail (desktop) that are found on all of our article pages that point to the same posts. (Edit: Added attachment. The links in the right rail under Editor Picks, Features, News, Media, etc. are found on every page of the site). In other words, we have thousands of posts that all link to the same 20 or so articles. Should we not do this if we're not trying to emphasize these posts in Google? Assuming this is the case, what is the proper way to do internal linking? Do we simply setup a sitemap and link to it? I'm hoping to have the thousands of articles we've published over the years have a chance to rank in search again. Also, we have a number of posts that are thin in content should those pages not be submitted in the sitemap? Thanks in advance! 2KmX0
Link Building | | leggo0 -
Would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video. ( For popular video's that are relevant )
I was wondering if it would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay / work out a deal with youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video they posted? ( For popular video's that are relevant to our business. ) Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance! Steven
Link Building | | RockyMountainFlyboard0 -
Is it worth it to link to sites that link to you in guest posts?
Suppose you published a guest post on a quality site and you link to a previous guest post you have written for another site (which links to you). In theory you could send link juice to the page that links to you for a second order effect. Has anyone seen results from this tactic?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Outsourced link building?
My company is looking at outsourcing part of our SEO - some supplementary link building to boost some deep links. What does the SEOmoz community think of outsourcing link building? Every company that I've researched seems to employ very low quality techniques, which ends up with a bunch of spammy/sidebar/links page/comment links. Are there companies that specialise in high quality link building? We would definitely be looking for people that would do things like write engaging guest posts, etc, rather than spamming our brand across the internet. Are there any lessons that you've learned that you can share with me?
Link Building | | AlecPR0 -
Which link should I use for link building?
I have an article which have high rank on Google. But recent, I use mod rewrite url so this article have new url. old: mywebsite.com/c1/p-1 new: mywebsite.com/c-e/p-1 Now, google is indexing old url. I want to ask when I build linking to my site, which link should I use for link building? I should build linking for new url or old url. Thanks
Link Building | | sonzin13040 -
Many competitor's backlinks are in content anchor links. Ho do I get these same links?
Hi I managed to open up OSE. I'm finding that much of the competition's backlinks are in content anchor text links. Am I supposed to get backlinks from these same pages using the same anchor text but linking back to my page or is that allowed? If so, how do I get these in content blog post links? Thanks. Sunil.
Link Building | | sunilmuse0 -
Link Building Question
Hello, Here is my situation - i'm number 10 for a moderate keyword and i want to rank higher . Using the Open Site Explorer i studied the links of 12 competitors and noticed the following : There are only 2 sites that are doing 100% white hat - one of them is on first page only because has a big,big domain autority, the other because is a brand name. The rest of my competitors are on first page using directory submissions (i discovered 200+ directories - and not counting those that are not indexed.), buying links (for ex check these 2 :http://www.dentistsburbank.com/links , http://www.dentistinaustin.com/links/ - there are 50+ more sites like this), spam forums and article submissions. For my site i tried to get only quality links, tried link bait, quality articles - etc(and this for more that 18 months). Unfortunately it seems that my efforts are not enough(seems that links from military.com are not enough to beat 200 low quality directories) and i want to ask the community what should i do. Shall i invest in directory submissions (it will cost around $1500) ? If not in directories in what shall i invest the money ? Are there any companies able to create successful link baits ? Shall i report the paid links hoping that Google will take action ? Any other ideas 🙂
Link Building | | allyteal0